[This is a Development Diary post. Everything in here is subject to change! Don't hate us! <3]

You may have noticed that there are two spots in the Overworld where soldiers keep you from going further. And you may have thought to yourself: If only that wasn't so, and the Overworld was bigger! It would feel so much more like a large RPG Overworld then!And you may have noticed a peculiar fellow, talking about something to happen sometime in the future, with exploring large worlds.

Well, today, we want to give you a sneak peek of what we are planning.

Dungeon Deities greatest strengths are its player created dungeons. This is a focus we've always had, and this is not changing. However, we feel that the concept of the Overworld allowed us to not only flesh out the world much more, giving Violet Land more context and texture, but gameplay-wise, it provided a valuable breathing space, contextualizing the dungeon exploration better, and, finally, providing a bit of a stark contrast to the dark and dangerous dungeon exploration. Additionally, the ability to gather information about a journey on the Overworld makes especially long dungeons much fairer, as you are able to prepare.However, the Overworld was much to small to fulfill these goals, and soon enough, you had seen everything (expect maybe for that secret).So most of you stuck to playing "Normal" or "Heroic" journeys, to get into the action much quicker.

We plan on soon opening the world to the east, allowing you to enter the "Wilderness".The wilderness is a new, large, procedurally generated map, that will change regulary, and that will host a number of Dungeons. How many dungeons, and how it'll look are parameters we will be constantly tweaking based on your feedback. For the moment, know that while it is generated procedurally, every player will see the same general layout, though the different teams may find different ways through them.

The overworld is generated with a focus on playability first. The generated "geometry" (where mountains, planes, beaches, etc. are) is subdivided into small areas (you can barely make out their outlines in the screenshot above). Then, we determine which of these areas are connected, and placing barries between areas that are not connected. While we do this, we also keep track of the difficulty the enemies in that region should have. In this way, you'll encounter easy enemies at first, but as you proceed to the harder difficulties, the enemies become more and more difficult (this is implied by the color of the dots). Periodically, we also decide where to place dungeons. These areas are then filled with enemies, trees, grass, and various other decoration items. All trying to make the world look nicer! Below, you can see a shot of a quick debug screen. Ingame, it will look much like the normal overworld does!

You may also encounter strange, magical barriers that will only vanish if you beat their corresponding dungeon.

We'll give you more details soon! For the moment, we hope you enjoyed this sneak peek!

You may have noticed that updates have slowed down a bit. We are still working very hard on this game, don't worry! But we are working more and even harder on the Wilderness, as we want you to explore it very soon. And the Wilderness is steadily growing!

We have fixed a few bugs, and improved the path-generation and object placement in the world, resulting in more interesting landscapes. Additionally, we have added now the new magical crystal barriers (the different, colorful spikes). Each of them correspond to one dungeon placed in the world, and only after you've beaten them once will these barriers disappear, unlocking more of the world for you to explore!

Next up: Actual dungeon placement at the places marked for them, then enemy placement.

At a later time, we may also add NPCs, houses, etc, to fill the Wilderness with even more life. But this will never be the game's focus, which is clearly the dungeons.

The shots we've shown you were not from Dungeon Deities. That was its own, standalone program, so we could quickly test and develop this system, without all the additional stuff that Dungeon Deities includes. This vastly speeds up the time required for testing.We have now included the World Generation code into the Dungeon Deities codebase. In other words, the game now includes the code necessary for generating these worlds. To enter there, you'll have to leave the Overworld to the East:

The world there will change regulary, probably with every Season. If it happens, your monarch will kindly inform you (and will keep pestering until you visit there!)

In the Overworld, we now place enemies, and of course, Dungeon Portals.

The blue, transparent blocks you can see here are showing invisible Collision boxes, which is necessary for the large trees.We do hope to launch this feature very soon! Apologies it's taking so long.There's also one more thing we want to share with you that will hopefully also make the next update. You may have seen a sneak peak of it on Twitter!

This current update was unfortunately delayed. Part of the reason is some unfortunate real-life stresses Tim and I had to endure, which will hopefully decrease soon, part of it was that we created a trailer to deploy when we are starting the "Open Beta offensive"

The other part of it was that we stumbled upon a bug in the engine we are using which affected the World generation on the Client.

Since the chance of this bug being fixed has been stated to be extremely unlikely, we have since investigated possible workarounds, and have identified a possible one.With this, we can soon start adapting the exact parameters for world generation. When that is done, we are planning on adding more features for your dungeons, to mix it up!

Our apologies for both the low update frequency these past two months, as well as the poor communication of it on our end.